“Ah! that is Mr Hope’s doing. He attends her, of course.”
“Oh, yes, Miss; he’s done her a sight o’ good.”
“Ah! so he always does: but Ritson, if he should not be able to attend to her quite so closely as usual, just now, you will excuse it, when you hear how it is.”
“Lord, Miss! the wonder is that he has come at all, so ill as he has been hisself.”
“I don’t mean that: you will soon see him very well now. He is going to be married, Ritson—”
“What, is he? Well—”
“To my cousin, Miss Ibbotson. He will be more at our house, you know, than anywhere else.” And with a wink which was a very good miniature of her mother’s Sophia passed on, leaving Ritson to bless Mr Hope and the pretty young lady.
She cast a glance into the butcher’s shop as she arrived opposite to it; and her heart leaped up when she saw Mrs James, the lawyer’s wife, watching the weighing of a loin of veal.
“You will excuse my interrupting you, Mrs James,” said she, from the threshold of the shop: “but we are anxious to know whether Mr James thinks Mrs Enderby really altered of late. We saw him go in last week, and we heard it was to make an alteration in her will.”
“I often wonder how things get abroad,” said Mrs James, “My husband makes such a particular point of never speaking of such affairs; and I am sure no one ever hears them from me.”